Architecture was not a field Hegel had studied widely. Perhaps as a result, his
treatment of architecture in his Lectures on Aesthetics does not attempt the
historical thoroughness of his discussions of literature and painting. He relies
heavily on a few sources and then restricts his chosen examples even further.

One major source for Hegel's treatment of architecture was the work of his elder
Berlin colleague Alois Hirt, who had written widely on ancient architecture. For
the most part, Hirt's work is historical narrative, trying to produce a sense of the life
(lebendiges Bild) of the ancient buildings. But Hirt also seeks to discover laws
(Gesetzen Grundsatze Formen Einrichtungen) that lie behind the form of each type
of ancient building.

As the overall law that underlies ancient architecture, Hirt proposes:

Its forms, its relations, its placement of parts near and above one another
always aim at what is appropriate to a goal. The comfortable and the agreeable
are always the result of the simplest means. Even the greatest and most
magnificent followed the same rule.

Here, Hirt sounds like a nineteenth century modernist espousing functionalism.
However, as Joseph Rykwert has shown, this kind of discussion of ancient
architecture in terms of its function already had a long history by Hirt's time. What
is unusual is not that Hirt should say such things but that Hegel should disagree
with them.

External Function

Hegel's discussion of architectural function is complex and nuanced. Hegel describes
architecture's difference from related arts in terms of the externality of function in
the architectural work. Further, his three stages of architecture are organized around
their relation to function: symbolic architecture comes before any posited separation
of function and means, classical architecture achieves a perfect balance of the two,
and romantic architecture goes beyond the dominance of function.

Architecture . . . is the art of externality, so that here the essential differences
depend on whether this external object has its meaning within itself or
whether, treated as a means, it subserves an end other than itself, or whether
in this subservience it appears at the same time as independent.

Function remains external in architecture: what architecture builds with has no
inner purpose of its own. Architecture deals with the external as such, nature on the
level of purposeless exterior other. Architecture shapes this into a purposive world
around us. But those purposes remain external to the building. Stones and bricks are
not part of an organism with an inner guiding form that expresses itself in their
being and actions. Given this general characterization, however, the relation of
purpose and built form varies in the different stages of architecture.

The Stages of Architecture and Function

Hegel's overall treatment of art is arranged according to his necessary logical
sequence universal - particular - individual. He first discusses the universal ideal of
art in general (der noch unentwickelten Einheit seiner Grundbestimmungen). Then
he discusses the ways in which that ideal particularizes itself into forms of art, the
symbolic, classical, and romantic (entfaltete sich . . . in sich selbst zu einer Totalität
von Kunstformen,). Finally he discuss the individual arts and actual individual
works of art embodying and realizing the general ideal of art and its
particularizations. (das Kunstwerk wahrhaft konkret, ein zugleich reales, in sich
abgeschlossenes, einzelnes Individuum). (A 14.245))

In his treatment of the individual arts and works of art, Hegel is confronting their
actual existence, not their notional essences. Nonetheless, he is still interested in
finding necessary relations. Philosophy does not just catalog the empirical; it is
always on the lookout for content which stands firm on its own.

For example, in the course of treating some puzzling forms of symbolic art Hegel
remarks:

In general, therefore, it is the same in aesthetics as it is in the natural sciences
with certain classes of animals or other natural phenomena. In both spheres
the difficulty lies in the fact that it is the very concept of nature and art which
partitions itself and posits its differentiations. As the differentiations of the
concept, they are now the differentiations which are truly adequate to the
concept, and therefore conceivable. . . . The true classification, however, may
proceed only out of the true concept, and hybrid productions can only find
their place where the proper explicitly stable forms begin to dissolve and pass
over into others.

In his aesthetics Hegel is concerned to examine the individual arts with a view to
their necessary and essential features. Hegel wants more than insightful
arrangement of historical material; he is out to find some necessity that will be
normative. This normativity can be seen at work in his remarks against various
kinds of excess in architecture, which we will discuss later.

Given Hegel's systematic goals, his discussion of necessary structure will be carried
out by tracing divisions and transitions implicit in the categories of art, and
connecting these with spatial and temporal diversity and development. In Hegel's
treatment many different notional and historical developments are going on at
once:
the development of the concept of art and its Ideal
the development of each of the three particular kinds of art
the development of the different arts in relation to one another
the development of the actual arts as they appear over time.
the development within each art, and within each stage of that art
These sequences do not always proceed neatly in step, nor do they follow the same
logical transitions.
Symbolic Architecture: Immediate Function

The beginning of architecture is the production of works that while they have been
mediated by human creative activity, have a content and mode of signification that
remains in a kind of unmediated immediacy. On this level, not only are ends and
means not separated, but architecture and sculpture are not clearly distinct. (A
14.268)

Hegel says, speaking of the relation of the first stage, symbolic architecture, to its
function, that such architectural works will

unites both factors [goals and means] and therefore appears within this
cleavage as independent at the same time. . . . undisturbed, as it were, by this
purpose . . . framed and erected on their own account and independently.

This means that of the three stages of architecture, only the second, classical
architecture, contains a balanced distinction of ends and means, with a clear and
formally dominant external purpose. But Hegel tells us that having an external
purpose is part of the essence of architecture. (Should we then say that there is
something non-architectural about the beginning, and the end, of architecture?)

Symbolic architecture is different. For one thing, it is not a well-structured category
for Hegel. Hegel's treatments of the other two stages of architecture are divided as is
his overall treatment of art: universal - particular - individual. The general
character of the stage is first described, followed by a particularized division of its
features and necessary aspects, concluding with a discussion of individual works or
categories of works. However, for symbolic architecture the general description,
while it comes first, is not one of the three main sections, and all of the sections
concern both particular types and individual works. Hegel admits that he is unsure
about how to divide up symbolic architecture, which escapes systematic
organization. He attributes this to the lack of differentiation in the content and the
resultant externality inherent in the symbolic mode of signification (A 14.274).

It is also striking that Hegel begins his discussion of art and architecture with
constructed things that are neither quite works of art nor quite buildings. Hegel
begins his treatment of symbolic architecture with the towers of Babylon and Belus;
the first is not a building but an artificial mountain, serving as a rallying point of
unity for a folk creating itself out of scattered tribes; Hegel takes this construct to
have no meaning except that of willed unity; pure immediate undifferentiated
unity. The second tower adds differentiated meaning in the form of cosmological
symbolism, but neither construction manipulates or creates an enclosed space,

Given the eighteenth century discussion in France about the "primitive hut" as the
beginning of architecture, Hegel's choice of a beginning is unusual and significant.
In Laugier's writings the primal architectural act is erection, support, and enclosure.
Hegel (who was aware of these opinions at least to the extent of later citing Goethe's
polemic against them) makes the primal act one of marking and assembling.

Enclosed spaces as such do not enter Hegel's discussion until the third sub-stage of
symbolic architecture, which is described as a transition to the classical. And even
there, Hegel says explicitly that the cave or hole comes (at least conceptually) before
the hut (A 14.289). Extending a natural cave into a subterranean room unites into
one seamless action the extending, the surrounding, and the creation of limits, and
it produces one undivided surface that plays all these roles at once. Only with
classical architecture will these roles be posited as separate and as assigned to
separated units of the architectural structure.

As a result, the function fulfilled in symbolic architecture remains globally identical
with the structure, without either being rationally articulated. To maintain this
position, Hegel has to keep Egyptian temple architecture from becoming classical; he
does this by stressing the naturalistic imagery dominating the shape of columns and
other building parts, and the lack of organic unity in the whole assemblage.

Although no architectural work can have organic unity in the strong sense in which
an animal body possesses such unity, symbolic architecture is particularly unorganic.
Hegel emphasizes the paratactic nature of symbolic unities. Egyptian temples
combine sculptures, columns, gates, rooms, and so on, but the mode of combination
is an uncontrolled one-thing-next-to-another. Such adjacency and addition is
characteristic both of the thinking and the construction in symbolic art.

In the case of symbolic formations . . . architectonic purposefulness is simply
adjoined and only an external ordering.

This adjoined-ness or next-to-ness is crucial. Being added on, being next to (a
Nebensache) is not only characteristic of symbolic art; it is what is specifically
architectural. Speaking of the different parts of classical columns, Hegel says of these
divisions that

the differences . . . must come into appearance as differences, on the other
hand it is equally necessary for them to be united into a whole . . . thisunification, which in architecture cannot be more than a juxtaposition, and
an association, and a thorough-going eurhythmy of proportion.

The specifically architectural quality involves next-to-each-other-ness and
stuck-together-ness, or paratactic order. All architecture is in this sense symbolic
architecture.

In the symbolic the overall assemblage lacks an overall organizing form that would
reflect the function of the whole. Classical architecture, though it remains paratactic,
will be called 'organic' because it has a rationally necessary order guiding its
parataxis. Romantic architecture will then go beyond parataxis by creating a whole
that overreaches its posited internal divisions. But these successes remain shadowed
by the externality of their medium and of the fundamental constructional act:
putting something next to something else.

Classical Architecture: Self-Showing Function

We can ask, if parataxis is the fundamental mode of architectural unity, why should
classical architecture be the most authentic stage of architecture?

The official answer is that classical architecture achieves a special free totality and
unity in a special mode of self-relation and self-showing.

Classical beauty has for its inner being the free independent meaning, i.e. not
a meaning of this or that but what means itself and therefore intimates itself.

Symbolic architecture "meant" through paratactic unities of many diverse
representations and ideas, mostly drawn from nature. In what sense is classical
architecture so different, indeed so closed in on itself that Hegel can call it sich selbst
Bedeutende?

Whereas Hegel despairs of a rational division for symbolic architecture, he is proud
of his way of organizing the basic forms and divisions of classical architecture.
Unlike the symbolic, the classical has a unifying basic type (Grundtypus), namely,
the form of a house surrounding an inside while remaining open to the environing
context. This basic type can have notionally precise divisions.

Hegel refuses to trace the necessity behind classical architecture's forms to their
acknowledged origins in wood construction. Instead he claims the forms (column,
base, capital, the parts of the architrave, the roof profile, the style of walls, and so on)
take their necessity from conceptual divisions posited by and within the overall
function of enclosure: for instance, bearing loads (columns are die materielle
Anschauung des Tragens (A 14.314)), being borne, enclosing (Umschließen), and so
on. The three major classical orders are then connected not to any anthropomorphic
imagery but to particular aspects of the notion of a building that stands securely and
receives ornament.

Hegel knows about more anthropomorphic and ligno-morphic analyses of classical
architecture. But he treats these imagistic and metaphorical origins as at best
secondary and at worst excessive in relation to the "true" deduction of the parts
from the basic ideas of standing and enclosing. This is particularly evident in his
discussion of half-columns: he says that they are contradictory (widerlich) because
they mix two opposed functions that have no inner necessity of being together. A
true column should be round and complete in itself as it gives visible expression to
the notion of support (A 14.316). Hegel here admits he may be going against the
received picture of the historical development of columns, as represented by his
colleague Hirt. (It is in this context that Hegel quotes Goethe against the primitive
hut.)

The categorial background of the language of classical architecture, then, involves
the building's own act of standing and enclosure. This sounds like Hirt's discussion
of function as the guiding rule of architecture. But, as Hegel indicates in his
discussion of half-columns, there are crucial differences. The function Hegel is
talking about is peculiarly self-related.

Levels of Identity and Function

This self-relation or self-showing in classical architecture needs to be examined in
order to understand the way function doubles itself in Hegel's vision of architecture.

We can distinguish at least six levels that are relevant here.

Level 0: absence of purpose

A building is a heavy thing, describable in mechanical and chemical terms. On this
level there is no teleology, nor any clear delineation of the building from the
surrounding physical and chemical things. There is no work of art. Hegel allows
that teleological systems can be described in this way, but says that to do so misses
their essence. An organism described chemically and mechanically is being described
as dead.

Level 1: Pragmatic Purpose

A building is a manifestation of subjective and realized purpose; it embodies and
realizes some pragmatic function. On this level the building is a tool. It brings
people together, entombs the dead, surrounds or marks an area, houses the gods or
provides a location for celebration and ritual, and so on. This is the level
conventionally referred to as the program for the building.

Level 2: Self-Showing

No matter what its program or pragmatic function, a building can have the
additional function of showing forth or embodying (darstellen) its own notional
and performative essence. This is not the same as its pragmatic function.

The Greek temple's pragmatic function is to house the gods and provide a point of
assembly for the community. Its columns and walls and roof could fill those
functions in many ways. The temple should also look like something that is
housing the gods, but this too could be done in many ways. But Hegel insists that
function on that pragmatic level cannot be the final determinant of the form of the
building. Hegel is concerned that in addition to these requirements the classical
building should have each of its parts each show forth their own notionally
determined role or action. A column should show forth load-bearing, a roof should
show forth being borne and not itself bearing (as in Hegel's argument why southern
building have pitched roofs even though there is no snow to worry about). What
should go on is a kind of self-reference, where the building reveals its own inner
activities of standing and surrounding. Those activities are not the same as the
building's external pragmatic function, though in the classical building they are
derived from the basic type and its overall function.

This self-showing of architectural function is posited explicitly only in classical
architecture, which is another reason why classical architecture is the authentic
form of architecture. This level of self-showing is missing in symbolic architecture,
whose underlying categories cannot provide notional control and whose form
becomes as a consequence fantastical and multiple. On the other hand, romantic
architecture has articulated notional control, but this concerns the overall plan and
leaves the particular parts freer than does the classical. Hegel is willing to correlate
with notional divisions the classical orders and the differences between Ionic and
Doric architraves. He will also find notional necessity in the cruciform plan of a
romantic church, and in its spires, but he leaves without notional guidance the
particularities of decoration and symbolism and the different kinds of vaulting and
pillars that replace the classical orders. The romantic does not lack resources to make
inner distinctions but it has gone beyond any relation among its parts that can be
stated in terms of categories of the Understanding.

Level 3: Expressing the People's Basic Thoughts

A work of art, by fulfilling its functions on levels 1 and 2 can fulfill yet another level
of function; it can embody the thoughts of the people, their basic categories and
general representations, their notions of individuality and its relation to the
universal.

This embodying is more than the pragmatic purpose of the building, and also more
than the self-showing of the parts of the building in their own notionally assigned
roles. The temple keeps the rain off the statues and provides a place of assembly; it
also shows forth support and load and such rational divisions. It does still more: on
this new level it embodies the relation of an articulated inner unity of meaning that
is fully expressed in the perfected particularity of an outside. This is the logical unity
appropriate to classical civilization. So the architecture is also expressing a category
or metaphysical vision of human life and cosmic form.

Just as with the first and second levels (pragmatic and self-showing functions), so
the second and third levels (self-showing and expressing the basic categorial
thoughts of a people) are fully distinct only in classical architecture. The levels are
mixed in the other stages of architecture. Symbolic architecture has for its first level
pragmatic function exactly this third level showing of a people's unifying
conceptions (consider the tower of Babel, which expresses only the notion of
immediate unarticulated unity). In romantic architecture as well, embodying the
contemporary notion of spirit's unity becomes the first level pragmatic purpose and
the second level self-showing of the building.

This third level overreaches the other two. But this is not yet the end. More than
the historical people are involved with the building. There are also "we"
philosophical observers, and for us there are two more levels of function.

Level 4: Doing What Architecture Does

By fulfilling its functions on the previous levels, the building is, to the eyes of the
philosophical observer, fulfilling a still more general function within the overall
development of architecture. For "us" the building's particular mode of unity and
its achievement on the second and third levels fit in as a stage in a narrative which
is not the narrative of this or that people but the story of architecture as a whole
relating inner meaning and function to outer form and expression.

Level 5: Doing What Art Does

But the narrative of architecture is itself a part of the deeper narrative of art as a
whole. We philosophical observers can also see the building as functioning within
the movements and transitions involved in art as a mode of absolute spirit coming
to itself. On this level all of architecture remains a first stage, functioning
throughout in the symbolic mode of signification.

These fourth and fifth levels of function are not available to the members of the
historical peoples, norif you grant an unargued claim about the spread of
philosophical vision in Hegel's modern stateto the citizens of the rational state.
They are the privilege and the task of the philosophical observer. We might,
however, envision a situation where these levels also became available to the
ordinary people as art becomes further self-conscious. I will speak about this
possibility below.
Function and Constraint

These levels of function put constraints on buildings. Talking of the arrangement of
his chapter on symbolic architecture, Hegel makes it clear that what he would like
would be fixed types and non-arbitrary assignments:

Yet if we ask for a more detailed systematic arrangement of this chapter and
the chief productions belonging here, we cannot in the case of this
architecture, as we can in that of the classical and romantic kinds, start from
specific forms, e.g. a house; for here there cannot be cited any explicitly fixed
meaning, or, therefore, any fixed mode of configuration, as a principle which
then in its further development is applicable to the range of different works.

When Hegel thinks that there exists such content that is fixed in itself and can be the
principle of a fixed mode of configuration, then he feels justified in criticizing
deviations from such essential tasks and forms of architecture. For example:

a purely superfluous use of these figures, because their real purpose is not to
carry a load.

(For other examples of Hegel censuring excess in classical architecture, see A 14.310
on the thickness of columns, A 14.319 on the proportions of the whole classical
temple, or A 14.322 on Roman orders and garlands on columns.)

There should be no excess, no Überfluss beyond what is proper for the proper
Bestimmungen. The form should be controlled by essences derived from
(speculatively) fixed content.

Nonetheless, in both symbolic and romantic architecture there is uncontrolled
excess. In symbolic architecture form is not controlled because there is no
speculatively fixed content to provide a measure; symbolic architecture is all excess.
In romantic architecture excess comes in the detail of decoration, sculpture, and
other particularizations that are not defined by the overarching Spinozistic unity of
the building in the way that the building's basic plan is defined.

We should not, however, think of Hegel as a modernist trying to control form and
decoration by reference to a building's pragmatic function. For Hegel the teleology
which is to control excess is not the functional teleology of the building as a tool (on
the first level of function), but rather the special teleology of self-showing and of
expressing the grounding categories of the time (the second and third levels of
function).

For example, in discussing the difference between posts and columns, Hegel
remarks that for a post

beginning and ending are determinations implicit in the very nature of a
column as support and on this account must come into appearance on it as
constituent features of its own.

Because there is this notional control, while excessively thin or thick columns and
half-columns may be quite functional for supporting the roof they fail to present
properly their own action of support.

In this control by notional essences, Hegel is close to modernist insistence that
building parts show their own function. But Hegel envisions those functions more
narrowly, even as they are allowed to admit and control un-modern decoration.

Notice that because this control comes from the level of self-showing function, it is
most effective only on the level of classical architecture, where that level of function
is explicitly posited. Pillar heights in symbolic and romantic architecture are under
no such constraints (in symbolic architecture there is no measure, and in romantic
architecture the pillars are part of a structure whose overall showing does not
depend on such clearly demarcated measurable functions, so the ratio of length to
width can become, as Hegel says, visually incalculable).

Hegel does find one kind of excess that is possible on the first level pragmatic
functionality. Hegel says that if a building tries to fulfill too many pragmatic
functions at once then beauty becomes only embellishment (Zierde), and goal
relatedness (Zweckmässigkeit) rules the building's form (A 14.348). But this
exception proves my point; Hegel worries about a building trying to fulfill too many
first level functions just because this gets in the way of the building fulfilling its
second and third level functions. So he does not intend to control the form of a
building by function in the sense in which Hirtand some modernistsuse the
word. This becomes even more obvious when we turn to romantic architecture.

Romantic Architecture: Beyond Function

While the classical attains a beauty that goes beyond the impressiveness of the
symbolic, classical beauty is in its turn subordinated in the romantic, which
introduces self-related infinity into architecture. The romantic building

has and displays a definite purpose; but in its grandeur and sublime peace it is
lifted above anything purely utilitarian into an infinity in itself.

Romantic architecture goes beyond the classical harmony of differentiated structure
with its task. Romantic architecture unifies its differentiated parts within a motion
that goes beyond the building itself. If classical architecture expresses its own
standing and rising, the symbolic expresses the concentration of the spirit within
(der sammlung der Gemuts in sich welche sich raumlich abschiesst) (A 14.332).

Hegel develops the particular divisions of the form of the romantic building out of
the basic type of a house closed in upon its own interiority and there open to the
infinite, rather than the classical house open to the environment while
surrounding the images of the gods. The colonnade of the classical temple let one
stand facing outward toward the world, but the windows of the gothic church raise
one up to the indeterminate openness of the sky and a light that is not that of the
Greek sun. The classical column speaks its own load-bearing, while the romantic
pillar rises upwards, bearing its load without effort within a movement that cannot
be defined by the task of resisting gravity (Das Emporstreben gerade das Tragen in
den Schein des freien Aufstigens verwandelt (A 14.336, see also 338)). The calculable
proportions of the classical give way to a romantic effect of the whole that goes
beyond measure.

The limited functions in the interior of the classical temple change to the open
independent space of the church that is generously indifferent to what takes place
within it. Its overall pragmatic function is swept up within its third level function,
or, more accurately put, its third level function is to express the people's notional
self-conception, which at this point itself is the third level awareness of spirit's
motion that sweeps up any first level pragmatic function within the its movement.

In a letter describing his impressions of the Cologne cathedral, Hegel wrote:

Cologne is huge. I searched out the Cathedral right away. The majesty and
gracefulness of it, or of what exists of it [building had just recommenced], the
slender proportions, the elongation in them, which do not so much give the
impression of a rise as of upward flight, are worth seeing and are wholly
admirable as the conception of a single human being and the enterprise of a
single city. In the Cathedral one vividly beholds in every sense a different
dimension, a human world of a quite different sort, as also of another time.
There is no question here of utility, enjoyment, pleasure, or satisfied need,
but only a spacious ambling about enveloped by high halls that exist for
themselves, and, as it were, simply do not care whether people use them for
whatever purpose. An empty opera house, like an empty church, has
something lacking in it. We encounter here a tall forest, though admittedly a
spiritual forest full of art, standing for itself, existing there regardless of
whether people crawl around down below or not. It could not care less. What
it is, it is for itself. It is made for itself, and whatever ambles or parades about
within its wallsor tours about in it with a green oilcloth knapsack and an
admittedly still unlit pipe in the mouthis, along with the caretaker, simply
lost in it. All thisstanding and walking around in itsimply vanishes in it.
(Letter #436, Hegel to his Wife, from Cologne, September 28, 1822, HTL 585 )

Such a romantic building relates to its particular parts in ways beyond explanation
through relations of the understanding such as part and whole, or function and
means. Such buildings are

entirely suitable for [their functional goals], but their real character lies
precisely in the fact that they transcend any specific end and, as perfect in
themselves, stand there on their own account. Therefore no simple relation
of the understanding determines the character of the whole.

Romantic architecture goes beyond the relations of the understanding and gives us a
presentation of spirit, whose turn inward is also a rising to the universal. But this is
not spirit in its full being-for-itself, since the externality of architecture cannot
capture that movement. The universal that this movement expresses is in is in its
way more Spinozistic than Hegelian:

The substance of the whole is dismembered and shattered into the endless
divisions of a world of individual variegations, but this incalculable
multiplicity is divided in a simple way, articulated regularly, dispersed
symmetrically, both moved and firmly set in the most satisfying eurhythmy,
and this length and breadth of varied details is gripped together unhindered
into the most secure unity and clearest independence.

The classical is the realm of organic totality, where parts have a precise function in
terms of the self-referential function of the whole. The romantic expresses a unity
that includes and goes beyond functional divisions. It expresses both the
particularity of the individual parts (the statues, the arches, the plan) and the life of
the substantial whole which moves beyond them.

We recall that symbolic architecture comes before explicit function; it is all function,
and all means, and all independent construction. Romantic architecture refuses to
be determined by the functions it nonetheless fulfills. Only classical architecture is
dominated by function, but that is the second level self-showing. So architecture in
general refuses to be reduced to pragmatic function.

A Supplement

Hegel's descriptions of romantic architecture emphasize a complex task done with
grace and transcendence. If the classical surrounds a usable interior and expresses
that function in ways that the symbolic cannot manage, the romantic achieves that
and more, not indifferent to function but overreaching it in the movement of
recollection and inward transcendence. If the classical posits the essential divisions
in its own concept in a way that the symbolic never could (because it had no unified
concept), the romantic also posits its internal divisions, but affirms an intenser
unity than the classical. If the goal of art is to bring spirit to presence in outward
forms, then the romantic achieves that goal better than any other architecture.

Given these considerations, we can ask once again: why does Hegel say that classical
architecture is the most authentic and proper architecture?

Hegel would answer that the Ideal of art is a perfect equilibrium of a self-articulated
inner meaning and proportioned outer form. That is achieved in classical
architecture. In romantic architecture the inner has begun to predominate. If, for
Hegel, romantic painting and poetry bring the end of art, perhaps we should say that
romantic architecture brings the end (or self-transcendence) of architecture.

But this emphasis on inner and outer suggests a way to renew our question: if
architecture as such always involves externality of purpose and paratactic unities,
and if as a result architecture cannot really ever achieve a perfect balance of inner
and outerwhich is why architecture remains low on the hierarchy of the
artsthen why should we not consider the symbolic be the most authentic stage of
architecture?

Hegel's reply would be that in the symbolic the necessary self-articulated totality of
meaning has not yet been posited. But perhaps we should wonder about the
possibility of that articulated totality of meaning. I argue elsewhere that externality
will not be so neatly subsumed. Furthermore, the classical unity refuses to be as
tidily harmonious as Hegel would have us believe. Hegel's notion of classical
architecture maintains its purity only by a too rigorous exclusion of naturalistic and
other "excesses" of meaning. Is the Egyptian temple really so un-classical as Hegel
says, and are the Greek temple forms so purely dominated by notional second-level
functions?

If there is some contamination of the classical that compromises the purity that
keeps it apart from the other stages, then it might not be so strange to suggest that a
hybrid of symbolic and romantic architecture may be where we now live: symbolic
parataxis plus free externality, plus a self-conscious movement that acknowledges
but goes beyond domination by inner divisions or by any level of function.

Hegel himself takes a step in this direction. Speaking of the walls and colonnades of
Greek temples, he says that

In these prostyles and amphiprostyles, these single and double colonnades,
which led directly to the free open air, we see people wandering openly and
freely, individually or in accidental groupings; for the colonnades as such
enclose nothing but are the boundaries of open thoroughfares, so that people
walking in them are half indoors and half outside and at least can always step
directly into the free open air. In the same way the long walls behind the
columns do not admit of any crowding to a central point to which the eye
could turn when the passages were full; on the contrary, the eye is more likely
to be turned away from such a central point, in every direction. Instead of
having an idea of an gathering together with a goal, we see a direction
outwards, and get the idea of people staying there cheerfully, without serious
purpose, idle, and just chatting.

An un-earnest, loquacious, un-economical Verweilen. Here the tension of inner
and outer is placed within a movement of dwelling with people and things in time;
Hegel's temple is acting rather like Heidegger's Greek temple, to open a world. Like
the Cologne cathedral, it offers a space not dominated by function, not even by the
second-level self-showing function that for Hegel is so crucial to classical
architecture. This dwelling with things is, like the symbolic, without a systematic or
functional center, yet like the romantic, it includes but is not dominated by goal or
purpose. But unlike the romantic it does not turn inward or upward in a motion of
its own that goes beyond the agora.

Such a more open notion of the classical might make possible a joining with the
symbolic and the romantic. That in turn might lead towards a Hegel-derived notion
of the postmodern, one that avoids endless irony and facile facade-ism, as well as
purist formal play.

Such a postmodern Ver-weil-en would be self-conscious life in a stronger way than
the agoraic life looking out from the Greek columned porch. This dwelling would
have become aware of itself as expressing itself in art as such. In terms of our earlier
discussion, we might imagine that the fourth and fifth levels of function had
become available to the community as part of what the community expected of a
building. Hence the building would publicly perform in a communal narrative
about art and architecture's history and career.

In this stage beyond (or completing) the romantic, the perspective of "we"
philosophical observers and that of the observed community would come together.
This would perhaps be an artistic parallel to the achievement of self-consciousness
in the modern state, or to the way the "we" and the observed consciousness come
together at the end of the Phenomenology of Spirit. This joining would continue
the never-complete liberation of architecture from determination by function.